Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “You will definitely go?”

  “Yes. I must play the part of one who is supporting the cause. It might stop any further inquiries.”

  “You can’t trust them.”

  “I am one of them,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “You are not. I believe you now, that you are not like other men.”

  I am at the ghetto for the last time. I shall never return. After this, I will make plans to return to Germany and find a safe place for Elsi.

  I wait in the surgery for the woman I am about to treat.

  She arrives in a silk dress with a fur collar, lipstick on, as if she is not part of the ghetto, as if she is part of the German elite. Though her eyes are dark, her face is pale with fever.

  “We meet again,” Lilli says huskily.

  She holds a cigarette between her fingers and draws from it greedily. Normally this would offend me: her arrogance and the smoke filling up the small space. But there are more disagreeable vices by this woman that I must contend with today, making the lesser irritations bearable.

  “We might as well get this over with,” she says, believing foolishly that she is the one in control.

  She heads to the back room and sits on the surgery bed, then stubs out the cigarette in a surgical dish. She unbuttons her dress, drops it on the floor, and takes off her underwear. This is nothing new to her. These surgeries are commonplace.

  “Fraulein Pedersen,” I say gently, “you must look at a more permanent surgery. These abortions will take their toll.”

  She shrugs. “Someday I might marry a rich German who will beg me for children. One can never know what is ahead.”

  One can never know. However, I do know that she will not be marrying any German officer in the near or far future.

  I drape a sheet over her body, but she is not concerned with modesty. She is watching me carefully. She is used to watching. I put on gloves and take out some instruments that have accumulated dust. I am missing some vital medicines—ones that I took home. No matter.

  I hum a tune, in my head, the one that Lena and I danced to at midnight, while I conduct an internal examination.

  “Why would a doctor choose to work here?” she asks. “You are too handsome for this line of work, let alone working in such a hole as the ghetto.”

  “Ah, well, there is much satisfaction in taking care of women. There are so many variables. It is challenging work . . . I hear that Herr Manz is leaving soon.”

  “Yes,” she says, and just for a moment I see a flicker of the eyelids: a touch of fear. I wonder what the new supervisor will think. Whether he will employ similar tactics. For Lilli’s sake, she must be hoping that he is just as debauched.

  “How are you feeling?” I say with faked concern, temporarily withdrawing my hand.

  “A little tired. It has been a stressful couple of months.”

  “Tell me—what has happened? I’m a good listener.”

  “You’re probably a spy.”

  I laugh softly. “There is no motivation for me to spy. I have everything I need. My father is a good friend of Himmler.”

  Her eyes widen.

  “Well, then, what am I doing with Hermann Manz?”

  I ignore the flirtatious comment and turn to put on a gown in preparation for an abnormally large quantity of blood.

  From inside my bag I retrieve some morphine and silver nitrate taken from Auschwitz. I cannot say why I have this: perhaps as proof to show my father, which it seems now would have been a waste of time, since he is immune to injustice. I inject some morphine into her arm, and she sinks back slightly, the drug taking instant effect.

  “So, Lilli, I’m concerned about you. Because you are far along, this will be difficult. Will you be able to rest afterward?”

  “For a short while,” she says, words now unhurried, her body slackening.

  “Do you live with someone? Someone who can take care of you?”

  “No. I live on my own.”

  “Has this always been so?”

  “I did have a young girl with me, the daughter of a dead friend. An old man who had been taking care of her was about to be deported, so he brought her to me.”

  “The young girl must owe you a great deal for your kindness.”

  “Yes,” she says distantly, eyes closed.

  She is clever. Even under the influence of drugs, it is difficult to induce information from her.

  “Perhaps you are relieved that you are once again living alone. Of course, there is little future for orphan children, is there not?”

  “Exactly! What was I going to do with her? Such a burden. After a week I asked Hermann to arrange some transport for her.”

  I fight the urge to search her expression, to know immediately, afraid I will show a break in my reserve. She is used to studying people and their reactions and may see through my charade.

  “To the camps?” I ask casually, still without looking at her, pretending to examine the surgical tools on the trolley beside us. I have to hope that the drugs will impair some of her inherent mistrust, that the brazen question will not end further inquiry.

  “She was so ill after all. What was I to do? The Germans are planning to take them anyway, I heard. I have a very busy life. Hermann did not like a child around.”

  “Of course not.” Even with heat rising to my neck, I remain calm. I was raised to stay in control. “Lilli, I have heard good things about you. I heard that you brought to the attention of Hermann Manz an operation smuggling people out of the ghetto.”

  “Hermann told you this?”

  “Yes, of course. We are very good friends.”

  “A group of vigilantes, murderers, they were. In fact, the friend I mentioned earlier, Hannah, had another daughter who was involved with the group. That stupid girl got her mother killed.”

  “How did you glean such intelligence?”

  “You seem very interested in this.”

  For several moments I ignore the comment while I clamp the cervix in preparation for the procedure. She winces.

  “Does that hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I turn away to retrieve an instrument.

  “It is my job to be interested, and this moment is all about you and your future,” I say. “Talking about things keeps your mind away from the task at hand. I had no idea of the important role you have. You are quite artful to obtain such important information. Perhaps you will receive an award for such service.”

  This time I meet her clouded gaze. She is perhaps thinking of something beyond the surgery for us.

  “Hermann recommended you highly,” she says.

  “I must thank him later. Please . . . talk about whatever you want to. Continue, but only if you wish. You can trust me.”

  She is lost again to the drugs and my hypnotic words of reassurance, and she closes her eyes.

  “Hannah told me that she suspected her daughter and friends were involved in something and showed me an address where she thought they were meeting. Naturally I don’t like misfortune for people that I am close to, but Hermann needed to know everything. I had no choice but to reveal the names of those attempting to destroy order in the ghetto.”

  “Of course,” I say. “You must have felt cornered, but you were only doing your job.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And this troublemaker, this friend’s daughter. . . also on the trucks?”

  “Elsi? Oh yes, thankfully.”

  “Now, if you can keep very still . . . that’s it. Just a pinprick.”

  “What is that?”

  “Painkiller.”

  I have given her a double dose of the narcotic I have brought with me. Lilli’s eyes roll back, and her head falls to the side. Her speech now slurred, almost unintelligible, she asks for some water, a request I ignore as I proceed with my work to remove the fetus from the womb. My task is difficult, and incisions are made in the uterine walls that are not part of normal procedure. I then take another bottle—silver ni
trate—and, through a tube, syringe the contents into her bleeding, now-empty uterus.

  Lilli moans slightly and shifts in discomfort, but it is doubtful that she can articulate the pain now, eyes shutting involuntarily. I stop what I am doing to watch her face: a pretty mask for something false and worthless.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Her eyes open briefly.

  “I feel quite cold,” she murmurs.

  I watch her for several moments before injecting more morphine. Then I retrieve two straps that I keep in the surgery to ensure my own safety, if necessary. She is unaware that her wrists are now fixed to the side of the bed. Not that this step is perhaps necessary. She is so close now to losing complete consciousness.

  Then I whisper, close to her ear.

  “How do you think Elsi felt in the prison while she watched her mother die?”

  Her eyes open suddenly. She has just enough cognizance of my meaning.

  “Elsi . . .” she whispers back.

  “She is safe and free,” I say lightly.

  Her eyes move from side to side. She blinks to recollect, to find sense in her now-addled brain. Her head rises slightly from the table, but her will is no match for the weight of the drug. Saliva bubbles at the corners of her mouth.

  “Relax,” I say, patting her limp hand. “Elsi will not die alone. You, however, will be buried with the decaying bodies of the people you sold out—your name thrown into a pile of irrelevance.”

  Words fail her completely now. She emits a series of low, garbled cat cries, her fingers weakly clawing at the bed. I shove a small towel into her mouth to soak up the sounds.

  I watch the blood pool on the table between her legs, occasionally mopping it up with towels. An hour later she sleeps, her skin becoming translucent in the bright light. So much blood, some of it transferring to my coat, as I predicted.

  I check on the guard outside and tell him that the patient is not faring well, and I must remain until morning.

  Sunlight. I must have dozed in the chair opposite the surgical bed. I touch her cold, lifeless body, pen a note, then to the front of the surgery.

  “Guard, the patient didn’t last the night. Please arrange for her to go to the crematorium immediately, and when Hermann Manz arrives, give him this note.” The guard leaves at once to get help to move the body.

  A debt for the lives of Elsi’s loved ones has been paid, in the only way I can, since the true perpetrators behind Lilli’s crime are, for now, unreachable. And in a brief moment on the previous evening when I questioned my own action, justification was the clear answer given. But I also believe a worse fate lay ahead for Lilli in the coming months; it is doubtful she would have lasted the ghetto without Manz. Despised by her own people and, though she believed otherwise, despised by mine, also.

  You did what you had to.

  As I commence to leave the room, I stop to study her face one final time. She does not look so different from when she first walked into the surgery, the changes between the two states too subtle, as if the leap between life and death is insignificant.

  I am numbly detached from the final outcome: an oddly weightless sensation. But yet there is enlightenment, also, something attuned to hope. A premise perhaps from where a greater cause can build.

  In the front room of the surgery, I phone for a car to take me home. While I wait, my thoughts turn to Elsi and what she must never know.

  Dear Hermann,

  I regret to inform you that the patient I was looking after at your request has died. Unfortunately the pregnancy was too far gone; however, she was persistent in her request for termination, despite my recommendations. She mentioned that a child would interfere with her work, not to mention the inconveniences to those she worked alongside. I believe that she had begun termination herself, which contributed to a rupture. Had I had access to a larger medical facility, there would have been only a slim chance of survival at this point in time.

  But rest assured, she did not feel pain and was made very comfortable toward the end.

  I wish you the best and trust that the service she provided will not be forgotten.

  Yours sincerely,

  Willem

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ELSI

  Willem has said that we are leaving for Berlin and that he has accepted a posting as commander at a center for young Aryan women and children.

  After Willem finished at the ghetto for the last time, he contacted several camps and pretended that he was looking for a missing Jew whose daughter Leah may have been sent to one of the camps. This Jew, he said, might possess useful intelligence about other Jews. But he found no one by the name of Leah Skovsgaard.

  He has told me that it is unlikely she has survived. He says things in a way that makes me think he doesn’t care, but the fact that he has taken care of me, has bothered to look for Leah, tells me otherwise. He is a good man, though complicated and emotionally controlled. But I should not be one to judge. I am complicated, if not damaged, also. Sometimes I shake in the night when I relive the shot that killed Mama or the sounds of the dogs as they bore down on me. Sometimes I feel my heart rise up high into my chest, my lungs feeling so crushed it is hard to take a breath.

  After Willem informed me that Leah had been sent away, I wandered the apartment, bent on revenge that I could never take. Then came the surge of loss and grief and rivers of tears. My time in the ghetto stretched further and further away, my time growing up with Leah dissolving into a handful of memories. Sometimes I dream that I am still in the ghetto and Leah and Mama are with me, only to waken and have to begin the grieving process again.

  It feels like hollow justice that Lilli died from a uterine rupture and blood loss due to pregnancy complications, as I wanted to confront her, to ask her how she could be so cold when my mother trusted her. I feel she got away with her crimes too lightly, that she didn’t suffer like the rest of us. She used us all to give herself a more comfortable life.

  Willem has suffered, too. He has lost someone he loves. I sometimes examine the photo of Lena in the sitting room. She is tall and thin, her hair dark. It is strange that with Willem’s background he would marry someone so unlike Aryan. She is neither beautiful nor plain, and ordinary in her glasses and her pressed white blouse and tailored trousers. They were good together, which is obvious from the way they smile at each other in the photo. She has died before her time, but at least she died knowing that she was loved.

  Willem has not spoken much of Lena other than the places they went to, the food they ate. He is remote but not cold. Kind but not loving. I have caught him many times staring at the photo of his wife. He understands my grief and has kept his distance. He is considerate. He does not want to interfere.

  He says that he will look after me, but it is difficult to know what is expected from me. That someone could rescue me from death and ask for nothing in return is a concept I struggle to accept. I am used to begging for more and receiving even less.

  I nearly gave my heart to Simon, but I do not believe that he loved me, not in the way I was hoping. I believed in his cause, but I have to admit that he felt no love for me. In Simon’s life there was no room.

  When Willem first posed the idea to me about leaving for Berlin, I was reluctant and said that I should stay in Poland, to try to learn news of my father and Leah.

  “How will you find this news? Where will you live?”

  “I will search for members of the resistance to help me, and move from Lodz where no one will recognize me.” I have not left the apartment for this reason. I have been inside these walls for weeks.

  “It is your choice,” he said. “But without me you will not be safe. I can give you some money and put you on a train if that is what you want.”

  I thought about this, tossed all night wondering, and by the morning I had come up with the obvious question: How can I be apart from Willem? In a short time I have grown attached to this man who sleeps in the next bedroom yet is so far away.r />
  “Let me check your heart?”

  Willem places a stethoscope against the bare skin at the top edge of my blouse. Every few days he checks that there are no secondary infections from my serious disease and from my time in the ghetto. He is thorough, gentle, and firm in his treatment. He listens intently to the noises inside my chest, as if I am not connected to them, as if I am not in the room.

  He has been leaving the apartment lately, especially at night. He does not say where he goes, and it is not my place to ask.

  “Very good,” he says, turning away. I can still feel his warm touch on my chest.

  “Why me?”

  Willem studies me, not answering at first.

  “Why didn’t you rescue someone else that day?”

  “You know why. You are easier to hide.”

  He retrieves something from his medical bag and passes it to me.

  “Here,” he says. “This is yours.”

  He hands me a card. It is my face that peers out from the photo. The card says that I am a German Pole. It says that I am Aryan. I look at the name, which is not mine.

  “How did you get this?” I ask.

  “Forgery here is a thriving business. It did not take long to walk around in civilian clothes and learn of someone willing to make such a document. And an envelope full of money to the forger means that you don’t even have to give your name.”

  “Elsi Gerhardt,” I read aloud.

  “Yes. I thought it safest if people thought we were married.”

  I smile.

  “Is that funny?”

  “Yes . . . no. I don’t know. Just strange, that’s all.”

  He looks away, perhaps with embarrassment. It is hard to tell.

  “When we are traveling it will keep you safe.”

  “What if we see someone we know?”

  “I am an officer, and you are my wife. And there is no reason for you to speak unless you are asked a question directly.”

  He has been helping me with German. Because of my strange accent, I am a German who has been living abroad for some time with my parents who opened businesses in Warsaw, and now I look forward to returning home. Willem believes that it is safer to live in the heart of Germany, under the very noses of those who might despise me. The streets of Germany are cleared of Jews.